Social Media Through SharePoint 2013

'Collaboration' is today, the primary focus for enterprises seekingto tap the power of social media technologies for their operations. Every enterprise needs to tap the knowledge, expertise,experiences, and skills of its workforce to stay competitive andachieve business results. SharePoint 2013 provides apowerful workspace collaboration and social media platform that enables enterprises to leverage socialcollaboration tools in a business setting to harness the creativityand knowledge of their community and channelize these to drivebusiness results. SharePoint 2013 with its rich social media, content management,records management and business process managementcapabilities is viewed by enterprises as a strategic platform fortheir portal, content and social (workplace) collaboration needs.

Microsoft has been pouring social features into the product from version 2001 via: micro-blogs, communities, my site, team sites, newsfeeds, status updates, alters workflows, surveys, tags and others.
With acquisition of YAMMER, the social features can be extended and integrate with mobile and cloud. These features are being enriched with each version and adoption and usage is a critical part of social drive in enterprise.

SharePoint is emerging as the top-most "Accelerated Collaboration platform" and its implementation for reduced TCO and faster ROI is becoming a key agenda for ever y CIO. In spite of the rich features and vast functionality of its product suites, its successful rollout poses several challenges like: identifying the right experts to map the business processes with the collaboration needs, strategy implementation planning, choice of the right tools and processes, drawing up of a phased implementation roadmap for the said domain and industry, planning of rollouts and defining of SLAs.

The following are the Key Challenges faced by Enterprises and IT leaders including CxOs, to enable Social drive thru SharePoint:

Need of Experts in Consulting and Implementations: 'Enterprise Collaboration' spans internal employees to external stakeholders with the degree of content / data to be exchanged varying with each scenario. This drives the need for judicious strategic planning, aligning with business goals, and a detailed implementation roadmap with budgets and schedules. This calls for knowledgeable experts with proven experience who can help the CIO team in defining these building blocks.

Tools and Processes for Quicker Rollout: Despite SharePoint undergoing significant improvements with each version, there still remains the need for customization to adequately meet specific business requirements. However, as a best practice, use of out-of-the-box (OOB) features is the most recommended approach. An alternative approach is to use third-party tools and processes. Choosing a right solution is the key for a quicker and successful rollout.

Ongoing Support and Maintenance Costs: Historically, it is seen that with successful SharePoint implementations, the end-user adoption and usage ranges from 10% to 300% within 9-12 months. With this phenomenal usage growth, the support & maintenance of the SharePoint environment is a key challenge for the IT department of an Enter prise. A structured Support model with a planned Maintenance regime can therefore ensure cost-effectiveness and thereby make the Enterprise social collaboration initiative a true success.

Today, Social network is becoming thriving ecosystem for an individual, with more powerful contribution as Information source, which can be replicated for an enterprise via: connecting employees, customer, supplier, agents and all stakeholders: because the more people who join (Connect) a social system, the more valuable it is. 'Social Hub' - new app, now available for Microsoft platform that brings external social media content into SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint 2013 Social features can help enterprises to bring Facebook and Twitter like feeling enabling true workplace collaboration, accelerated adoption, no security risks, protected data and content with controls.